Defenses That Refuse to Rotate Spin Out

A good, sound, up-to-date NFL team is one that rotates two defensive lines, reasoning that it has a better chance to win with eight fresh pass rushers than four tiring all-pros.

Indianapolis quarterback Peyton Manning taught that lesson to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and their all-pros Monday night.

The Buccaneers have hired the best front four on the continent, but they don’t rotate defensive linemen, and Manning wore out the all-pros chasing him on a long series of long passes.

Then, no longer bothered by the suddenly weary Buccaneers, he rallied the Colts to a surprisingly easy 38-35 comeback victory with the most artistic passing show in recent NFL history, completing so many third-down throws that his official rating as a third-down passer must have bolted into the stratosphere.

It was one of the great personal quarterbacking triumphs of all time. And the way it came about was predictable:

* Defense is much more exhausting than offense for NFL linemen.

* The best way to combat that is with extra defensive players -- two defensive lines.

This relatively new trend hasn’t yet spread to Tampa, and so the Buccaneers became what is believed to be the first team to blow a 21-point lead with less than four minutes to play.

Tampa’s collapse enabled Manning to finish with 34 completions in 47 throws for 386 yards, even though his offensive line had been unable to protect him when the night was young and the defending champion Buccaneers were rested and eager.

Although Tampa Bay’s defensive front four is the NFL’s best since the Ram days of Deacon Jones and Merlin Olsen, all four of them wore down, sprinting in to smash the Colt quarterback. He didn’t deflate.

Thus on Manning’s long overtime drive setting up the winning field goal, he could make all four of the critical third-down plays that beat the best team in football. Four consecutive big third-down plays. That’s extraordinary.

The Strange Penalty

The leaping penalty, the rarely called restraint that gave the Colts a second chance to win in overtime after their flustered kicker, Mike Vanderjagt, had failed the first time, is in the NFL code for the players’ own protection -- and it belongs there.

If you let every tall, eager professional jump as high as he wants whenever he sets out to block a field goal, he might come down heavily on somebody’s leg, then spin awkwardly away, turn a cartwheel, fall on his head, and injure himself or another player. Serious injuries on kick-prevention special teams threatened regularly in the old days before the rules were tightened.

It was one of the Buccaneers’ tiring all-pros, Simeon Rice, who summoned the energy to make the illegal blocked-kick attempt that awarded Vanderjagt a second chance. Then he lucked out the second time.

Even so, the leaping penalty isn’t what beat Tampa Bay. It was Manning who won this game. It was Manning who beat Tampa Coach Jon Gruden, who had inherited the defense from Tony Dungy, the Indianapolis coach who bested him this strange night in Tampa.

Gruden had seen no reason to modernize the great defensive line that Dungy willed him -- modernizing with four journeymen in a rotation system with all his all-pros -- but conceivably, he sees some reason now.

For as they age, the Buccaneers will be increasingly vulnerable to a quarterback like Manning, a quarterback with a lively young passing arm and the young, strong legs to carry him away from Gruden’s bruisers. At present, Gruden seems safe. Now that Brett Favre is aging too, there’s only one Peyton Manning.

Many Great Games

There are so many good ways to play winning football that “the greatest game ever played” has been played many times.

One of the best shows was Monday night’s. No other coach and quarterback have been able to do what Dungy and Manning accomplished in their 28-point fourth-quarter rally from 35-14 to 35-35, after which their little three-point overtime performance was almost a formality against Gruden’s dog-tired all-pros.

Or, possibly, the best game played was in Kansas City Sunday when unbeaten Kansas City came from behind to conquer unbeaten Denver, 24-23. Both sides scored in every quarter to keep it dramatic before the Chiefs won with a humdrum play: another long kick return by Dante Hall, his seventh in 10 games, this one for 93 yards.

Or the best game might be today when the NFL’s new power, 4-0 Carolina, a conqueror of Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay, lines up against the other giant-killer, 5-0 Indianapolis.

Some say the all-time best game was played 45 years ago in New York when Baltimore’s 1958 whiz team won the NFL title by eliminating the New York Giants in sudden-death overtime, 23-17.

Within days, New York newspapers had christened that one “greatest game ever played” as well as “the game that made football No. 1.”

But was it? Not quite, I’d say. Football had become No. 1 years ago, in the early 1950s, when the Los Angeles Rams began attracting crowds of up to 90,000 and (annually) 900,000. The New York writers, smarting from the defection of the Dodgers and Giants to California earlier in 1958, were mainly just sending a message to baseball.

They were also honoring one of their own, the football Giants, who stayed in the East after the baseball Giants skipped out. Best of all for the New York writers, branding the 1958 sudden-death game as greatest ever was telling the world that everything worthwhile happens in New York.

Lombardi Won It

A better candidate for best even was the 2000 Super Bowl renewal at Atlanta, where the explosive Rams passed for a record 414 yards against Tennessee’s superb defense but needed a championship-saving tackle at the one-yard line to win, 23-16, on the game’s last play.

Still, football has been around for more than a century. And of the games I’ve seen in the last 66 years (including all of the above) the “greatest ever played” was presented in the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day, 1967, when the Green Bay Packers edged the Dallas Cowboys for the pro championship, 34-27.

It was the last NFL title game played before the start of the long Super Bowl series. And to many sports fans, it was the biggest football game that season -- which explains why the first Super Bowl didn’t sell out two weeks later in Los Angeles (where the Packers beat Kansas City, 35-10).

Matched in the Cotton Bowl that first day of 1967 were the NFL’s 1966 conference champions, a Dallas team led by the league’s only prominent passing coach, Tom Landry, and the great running team of that era, the Vince Lombardi Packers.

Lombardi, fearing Landry’s passes, won by abandoning his ground-power machine and repeatedly ordering Green Bay into pass formation. On a day when quarterback Bart Starr stepped out of character and threw four touchdown passes for the Packers, they opened a 14-0 lead, only to be caught before the end of the first quarter, 14-14. It was still close at the half, 21-17, and thereafter, but Lombardi kept Starr throwing, and although Dallas quarterback Don Meredith’s 68-yard scoring pass play was the longest of the game, Starr edged him with his last two touchdown passes.

Broncos AFC’s Best

Denver demonstrated in a beautifully played Week 5 game at Kansas City that although it was to lose eventually to a kick return, it’s the best team in the AFC West and most likely in the AFC. Quarterback Jake Plummer outplayed Kansas City quarterback Trent Green and, in a matchup of strong running backs, Clinton Portis outperformed the Chiefs’ Priest Holmes.

Assuming that injuries equalize in the meantime, the Broncos will win the rematch Dec. 7. They have some big ones ahead -- at Minnesota this month and against New England next month, among others -- but they’re still on a Super Bowl course.

The kick-return touchdown that outscored Denver, Hall’s 93-yard run, was actually a 98-yard play, measuring from the point of his furthest retreat. “Oh, Dante, don’t go backwards,” Kansas City Coach Dick Vermeil exclaimed.

But that’s part of Hall’s style.

He can change direction quicker at speed than any peer -- which tells you what makes Hall run. Moreover, his ability to stop and start abruptly is unusual. He also has a rare knack for shifting into full speed at any moment to bypass opponents who seem to have the angle on him. Thus four big runs in four games, an NFL record.

Clearly, a Hall return is no fluke. But along the way, he has enjoyed the luck that’s ever present in football. This time, at the start of his 98-yard run, a teammate illegally clipped two opponents. He wasn’t detected, and Hall raced on.

On top of the big plays that had brought Denver’s advantage to 23-17 with seven minutes left, Hall’s long run pushed the game into the realm of game of the year or, if you prefer to wait a while, game of the half year.

CBS’ Wrong Call

Even before the Denver-Kansas City game was played, it had figured to be, at least, game of the day. Here were two high-scoring pro clubs with sound defenses, both 4-0 in the standings, and both so well coached that a close fight seemed inevitable. So why wasn’t the game on the CBS channel in Los Angeles, Channel 2?

Why did CBS decide to present 2-2 Oakland at 0-3 Chicago instead? Hadn’t those two teams already made their ineptness clear?

In a late Sunday night program when the Week 5 games were over, a CBS announcer, Jim Hill, called Denver-Kansas City the game of the day. But it had been that, and more, all week. Why didn’t Hill tell it to his CBS superiors before the game? Why does CBS appear to be in bed with the Raiders?

Spokesmen point to a thing or two about ratings. And it’s true that the Raiders have a following here, but Los Angeles is an increasingly sophisticated sports town that would turn up higher ratings for bigger games down the road if the week’s best was regularly shown.

The goal of a national network with an affiliate in the Los Angeles area -- a place where more residents come from elsewhere in the nation than any other U.S. area -- should be to present the big NFL game of the week every week.

Even the most provincial fans are tiring of the Raider penchant for penalties and so many other mistakes.